Last month the Daily Beast decided that Cairo had lost its voice. It’s a political insurrection (or something), not a commercial for cough medicine. One suspects this means the sound of the traffic heard by the correspondent from on taxi journeys between the airport, hotel, meetings, dinner and airport. What about the suburbs which corral the city? This is a commonplace for writing about cities in developing countries; the overwhelming noise of the city, this truism dictates, has deprived its inhabitants the self-expression you see in the hushed sanctuary of a Western metropolis. Writing about the Arab Spring often conveniently forgets that cities in America and the UK have witnessed an array of diverse and innovative acts of police aggression against protesters. [Read more...]
The Daily Beast and Egypt’s art revolution
Sindiso Nyoni’s Riot Art
Short recent video profile by VOA’s Nico Colombant of the Zimbabwean artist, illustrator and designer R!OT (also known as Sindiso Nyoni).
Photography. The Jews of Morocco
Aaron Elkaim is a documentary photographer based in Toronto. He studied Film and Cultural anthropology before deciding to pursue photography. With four other Canadian photographers, he founded the Boreal Collective. His photo-essay “Exodus,” which won second prize in the 2010 Viewbook Photostory documentary competition, explores the remains of the Jewish communities in Morocco. He documents personal and familial narratives, archival and architectural remains of Jewish communities in modern-day Morocco. The accompanying notes mention that the Jewish community was founded over two thousand years ago, prospered for centuries, and grew to occupy a proud place within Moroccan national identity. [Read more...]
Spoek Mathambo’s World
No we’re not on a mini-Spoek Mathambo marathon today. Intrigued by Spoek’s remix of Seun Kuti and the trailer for his new album, we googled Spoek anew and stumbled upon this video of a 2011 presentation Spoek gave at TedxSoweto (it was only uploaded onto Youtube at the end of last month). What I find useful about the video is that it offers a compact picture of Spoek’s biography: from Soweto via the “suburban island” of Sandton to where he finds himself now as a sort of global electro-rapper. It’s worth the 20 odd minutes if you want to get a sense of his influences. He talks about his record collections, his dad’s record collections, local and international musical influences (including Max Normal/Waddy Jones of Die Antwoord fame), South Africa’s HIV culture of fear, cultures of kwaito and party, Ghanaian and Nigerian film posters (where he referenced his last album cover), the inspiration of Nigerian DIY (horror) movie culture, making Africa a smaller place through new media, the crucial point of representation (“the more that we don’t represent ourselves, the more people will make careers out of misrepresenting us or representing us the way they want to represent us”) and his collaboration with fellow South African, photographer Pieter Hugo (and Hugo’s critics). Hugo’s work is contrasted with that of American photographer Phyllis Galembo on West African masquerades and South African artist Michael MacGarry. He also gives his interpretation of ‘Umshini Wami’, and his fundamentals: “How am I representing myself? How am I representing the people of Africa? And is accuracy [when building a ‘speculative fiction’ through his work] important?”
January in Cairo IV: the two faces of Egyptian art
Om Kalthoum, the late great Egyptian singer, stands in the studio of Khaled Hafez. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open in song or lament. There is not one of her, but six (including a shadow), laser-printed repetitively across a wide canvas. She has her trademark hair, evening dress, large earrings. One hand raised in emphasis. The other holds a curious flesh-coloured object. A stained shawl? A chicken with its neck wrung? ‘First as tragedy, then as farce.’ Khaled, one of the most internationally-celebrated Egyptian painters, is working through the visual clichés of her legacy. One of Kalthoum’s nicknames is Arabic for “the woman”, a word he says comes from Isis. For Khaled, the tension between her quest for a secular womanhood, and the old-fashioned elegance she represents, makes her an embodiment of independent Egypt. I visited Khaled’s studio in Heliopolis at the beginning of January to ask for his perspective on contemporary art and the situation in Cairo. [Read more...]
Shameless Self Promotion
Two Africa is a Country contributors–Neelika Jayawardane and Kathryn Mathers–have pieces in the latest issue of Transition, the Harvard creative writing magazine. That’s the cover above with the theme “Blending Borders.” Neelika’s article “Everybody’s got their Indian,” (you need a subscription) is on racial politics in postapartheid South Africa. Though she’s been meaning to write about this topic for a while, I know this visit to South Africa let to the piece. Kathryn’s has a similarly provocative title, “Mr Kristof, I Presume.” (Hers you can read in full. The link takes you a PDF of the article.) Here, before you click away, is the first page of Kathryn’s article: [Read more...]
How to feminise a tank
Nadine Hammam is an Egyptian artist making work around the embattled domain of the female body. We speak as she works on a series which will go to Art Dubai at the end of March.* This, she tells me, addresses “political issues and gender issues, using the female nude”. Gender is one of the Egypt revolution’s most complex domains. Sophia Azeb has engaged with it in these pages. Sarah Topol has recently blogged in the IHT about sexual harassment Egyptian women have faced since the revolution. Hammam’s work maps out the social and psychological position of the female body through the dialectic of the naked and the nude. A recent series, ‘Heartless’, featured the silhouettes of women, adorned with splatters of what might be blood, stamped with slogans like ‘i need a revolver more than i need you’. I’m interested to know if her work consciously seeks out controversy, aiming to provoke political debate around gender. [Read more...]
Egyptian Post
Arguments around the affinity between art and pornography have been too frequent in Egypt recently. I have mentioned Mahmoud Amer’s accusations in recent posts. Sophia Azeb has described the hysterical responses to Aliaa Elmahdy’s naked self-portraits. Against the gaudy backdrop of these arguments – where conservatism and protest, Islam and Western, religion and ‘secular’ art are divided into predictable encampments – consider this painting by Mai Heshmat. It’s her proposal for the new Egyptian stamp – now Mubarak’s head has been deposed – and demonstrates a refreshing humor. This woman’s facelesness is suggestive of the way bodies have become canvases for political debate. Remember the logic that virginity tests were carried out by the army on female activists in order to establish that they could not claim to have been raped by the soldiers. And yet the work, veiled in colour, seems playful, even celebratory. There is something jarring in her acid green outline: it is an ambivalent and satirical image. This is art which provokes thought without seeking to be provocative.
Zarina Bhimji: “A photograph cannot give you concrete information”
Zarina Bhimji’s exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery is the first major survey of her work, documenting 25 years of her artistic practice. Throughout various mediums — photographs, films and sculpture — Bhimji’s attention is shown to lie on the layering of human histories upon objects, and although she strongly states she is not addressing the history of colonialism and her own experiences as a Ugandan in the 1970s, her work inevitably touches on this history. She charts poetic and ambiguous themes by examining the traces that colonialism has left behind.
Get Up, Stand Up
Tunisian born artist Amel Bennys, who works between Tunis and Paris, has just had her first solo show at the Selma Feriani Gallery in London. ‘Get Up – Stand Up’ includes ‘Fin de Partie’, a series of heavy-duty mixed media works on canvas (seriously interesting – see below), and a selection of sketch-books. Her sculptures are due to be shown in London in Hanover Square this May.
